And what to do about it
We hope you read the column by Tribune reporter Charissa Graves last week.
In case you missed it, she got hit by a car while walking on Main Street in Hutchinson. All involved are fortunate the outcome wasn’t worse. We won’t restate her experience, but it got the newsroom talking about our wide streets in Downtown Hutchinson.
Main Street is 80 feet across where our new Hutchinson Tribune offices are located, at 322 N. Main St. There are four lanes of traffic and angled parking on both sides of the street that can obscure drivers’ vision—this is a classic example of a ‘stroad.’
Stroad is a term coined by the organization Strong Towns back in 2013.
According to their website, Strong Towns is an organization dedicated to working toward “a pattern of development that is financially strong and resilient” and “for cities of all sizes to be safe, livable and inviting.”
Community organizations like the Chamber, Young Professionals, Hutch Rec and the Hutchinson Community Foundation have partnered in the past to bring Strong Towns to the area. Charles (Chuck) Marohn, the Founder and President of Strong Towns, has visited Hutchinson multiple times to share his organization’s research and vision for sustainable development.
In his most recent book, “Escaping the Housing Trap,” Marohn outlines reasons why and how cities can approach housing differently. We note with optimism that the City of Hutchinson is adopting some new strategies to make progress on that particular challenge.
Hutch’s wide roads, however, tell a different story—one of missed opportunities and a lack of vision. We think there are opportunities to learn from Strong Towns on this topic as well.
Except for a small road diet on South Main Street, Hutchinson’s Downtown corridor is several lanes wide. Lorraine between 30th and 17th avenues, and Third Avenue between Poplar Street and K-61 are two other examples of very wide stroads in Hutchinson, among many others.
A stroad, according to Strong Towns, is when a street gets combined with a road. A street is “a place where people interact with businesses and residences, and where wealth is produced.” A road is “a high-speed route between productive places.”
Stroads arise when we prioritize cars instead of prioritizing all people, including pedestrians, bicycles, e-scooters, alongside other vehicles.
Unsafe conditions are created when these two purposes are combined into one thoroughfare. Wider streets encourage faster speeds of traffic, regardless of the posted limits. Long distances between the curbs make it hazardous for walkers trying to cross the street. A lack of turning lanes or turn-specific traffic signals at many intersections increases the risks to drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians alike.
And if you haven’t tried to back out of the angled parking recently, you are lucky—poor visibility, especially from a smaller vehicle, makes just parking on Main Street more difficult than it needs to be. Parallel parking or reverse angled parking would both make it easier for drivers to see traffic when exiting their spot.
Often, when we talk about safety, there is a tradeoff where it is more expensive to do the safer option. In this case, stroads are often more expensive to build and maintain, as the wide streets require a lot of concrete, and the cost of ongoing maintenance is multiplied by every lane of traffic.
For example, the initial paving and then future repaving of four lanes of traffic costs twice as much as two lanes. Redesigning stroads into functional streets may sometimes cost more in the short term, but that is made up for in long-term savings.
Past opportunities to address these challenges on Main Street have been missed. More than a decade ago, when there was a suggestion to experiment with reverse-angle parking to improve the safety of street parking Downtown, that was deemed too big a change for residents to handle.
An effort pre-COVID to add bike lanes and reduce the number of lanes on South Main toward Carey Park was met with resistance and voted down by a divided City Council. The most recent repaving on North Main made the stroad even wider.
Despite challenges, there are some bright spots to celebrate. The oft-maligned bike/pedestrian island at 17th and Washington is an example of the kind of thinking we would like to see more of. The City says they are planning to keep sidewalks and bicycle paths in mind when they take on new road projects going forward. We hope they do.
Opportunities to make big changes to public infrastructure can be few and far between, which is why it is important to take them. One stroad that should be coming up for maintenance soon is East Third Avenue—a great candidate for reducing the number of lanes and adding bike lanes. We encourage local City officials to engage with local bike and pedestrian advocates when they consider the redesign of major thoroughfares like that one.
Streets should be for people, not just for cars. When we build in a way that encourages people to be in our business districts rather than speed through them, we create a safer and healthier environment while saving public money and creating a stronger economy as well.
-The Hutchinson Tribune Editorial Board